Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Terrapin

A savory dish of roasted chicken mixed with cream, butter, flour, spices, egg yolks, sherry, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Roast the chicken and let it cool.

  2. Remove the skin and gristle, then cut the meat into 1‑inch pieces.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the chicken and cream.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the butter and flour with salt, cayenne, mustard, and nutmeg.

  2. Blend the hard‑boiled egg yolks into a paste with the butter mixture.

  3. Heat the chicken and cream until boiling, then stir in the paste.

  4. Allow to boil for just under 5 minutes.

  5. Add the sherry and the chopped egg whites.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main body of the dish as cooked meat pieces.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, helping form a smooth, creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and combines with flour to thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the butter.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and give it a thick, smooth, creamy texture.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Boil for just under 5 minutes. Once the paste is stirred in, the sauce must boil long enough to thicken fully, since flour starch needs boiling temperatures to swell and set. Boiling too long can make the cream separate or the sauce turn overly thick.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, cream, flour, butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, flour, butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes